Why Success And Failure Aren’t Real
It’s all subjective, and besides, life has bigger plans for you.
Many years ago, someone posted a question on Twitter: ‘If I knew I wouldn’t fail, I would…’
I’ve seen this question used as a way to help us figure out our big, scary, exciting dreams. The next step is to encourage you to ignore or accept the possibility of failure and try anyway. Which, yep, I totally agree with that.
But what popped into my head at that moment was this: If I knew I couldn’t fail, I would never need to bother trying. Call me a contrarian.
But, really, if you knew for a fact that you’d win that race/get that job/win that person’s love/climb that mountain, how much of it would you be bothered to try?
Isn’t it the possibility of failure that gets your heart pumping, your adrenaline flowing enough to get yourself off the couch to give it a go?
Maybe it’s just me, but the thought of climbing Mt. Everest with the guarantee that I would make it to the top and back down again, alive, safe and with all my fingers and toes makes it look more like a lot of damned hard work and less like something that should be on my bucket list.
Applying for a job you know you already have? Boring pointless annoying paperwork.
If I had known the day I asked him out for lunch that Alan and I would fall in love, get married and have a great life together, I might have calmed down enough to finish university, rather than racing to the altar just to be sure.
If every act of unprotected heterosexual congress were guaranteed to result in a viable pregnancy, well, there would be fewer instances of it, wouldn’t there?
But we don’t know what’s going to happen. There are no guarantees.
Even the most risk-averse among us take chances. You get up in the morning, and you face the day. And sometimes you end up with thirty-six years of happiness, and sometimes you end up with an “I’m what?” And you never really know which it’s going to be.
I don’t know about you, but I love not knowing if I’m going to succeed at something. I love the adventure of not knowing how it will turn out. The delicious possibilities, the surprises and, yes, even the ‘Oh crap’ moments are what keep me moving forward.
Alan and I have taken chances, started and ended businesses, uprooted ourselves to move somewhere else and try something new. Some of these things have worked out brilliantly, some not so much. But we love the adventure, the not knowing. We’re always looking out for new, enticing possibilities.
They don’t have to be “Climb Mt. Everest” huge. Starting a blog or a new friendship counts. Getting your head around an idea that could be shot down in your next conversation counts, too. I think that big or small uncertainties are worth all celebrating.
Failure is Unavoidable
It’s not just about taking chances on jobs or dates, pushing yourself athletically or mentally, or trying to learn a new, complicated and possibly futile skill.
If it were just that, we could all avoid failure if we wanted to.
We could go an entire lifetime with no risks and no failures if we wanted to. We’d end up with really small lives, but for some, that would be fine, thank you very much.
The problem is, of course, that you cannot avoid failure.
It’s built right into being human, to being alive. And if it’s going to get you, no matter what, you might as well have some practice ahead of time, keep those failure muscles supple, build your Try Again capacity and your Give Up and Move On ability.
How do I know this? What gives me the right to even talk about this?
Alan and I got married with the intention that we would have babies, that we would raise a family.
Nothing unusual about that. Lots and lots of people do it. You wouldn’t think it would be such an arena in which to practice the fine art of failure. And yet it was.
Nothing happened. Month after month went by with no good news to report to our families and friends. We went to see the doctor. We were tested, and I was put on fertility drugs.
Five years and four miscarriages later, Alan and I were in the middle of a raging argument one night.
Because, you see, those drugs don’t just make you fertile. They make you fertile and mad as hell. Mad in both senses of the word. I was so not myself. I was so not who I wanted to be. I was so not who Alan wanted to be married to.
And here we were, fighting yet again, damaging our marriage, feeling desperate and sad and lost when Alan said the magic words: “We don’t have to keep doing this.”
And there it was, all sparkly and tantalizing: a way out. Yes, it was giving up, which most would see as failure.
You hear such stories when you’re trying to have a baby, of the incredible lengths people go to to get there. The woman who had NINE miscarriages before she ended up with a perfect baby boy. The couples who go so far into debt that they may never get out of to pay for fertility treatments that may not work or may work so well that they end up with more babies than they can handle.
And you’re told you should do this. Accepting that maybe it’s just not to be is not supported.
“You’re quitting?” ask people who barely know you and have no right to pry.
So when Alan suggested just that, it was baby-making heresy. Illicit, somehow. Wrong. But it was either that or get back on the misery-go-round of if at first you don’t succeed you get back up on that horse and you keep on trying.
We quit, stopped trying, gave up. We failed. And we never looked back.
People still sometimes ask why we don’t have children.
“Well, did you try this?” they ask, “or this?” as though we didn’t know the options open to us. And some of them see our decision as a failure, and some of them see it as strength and acceptance. I no longer care how they see it. It is so much a part of our life together, part of what formed us, that questioning it is like questioning gravity or air. It just is.
And here’s what I most want to tell you about all this, the lesson I hope you learn: Nobody but you can decide if what you do is a success or a failure. Nobody.
And you can’t decide that for anybody else, either.
Our path is our path. And what goes into our decisions and what happens to us is mostly unseen by others and so often beyond our awareness, too.
Success and failure are such harsh judgments to make against anybody, especially against yourself.
Yes, there will be so many times that you feel like you’ve failed, when you try to get somewhere, and you go somewhere else entirely. When you are utterly disappointed with the situation you find yourself in right now.
But that’s not where you’ve ended up. The end of the story hasn’t been written yet, and you don’t know what might change. Today’s colossal disappointment can be the necessary step to tomorrow’s fantastic.
Or next year’s ‘okay’. Life goes on.
For now, I’d like to try a new motto on you, one that goes against what many self-help types are peddling, the ones at least, who say, “There is only do or don’t do, there is no try.”
I say the hell with that. My motto? Please tell me how this works for you.
There is no succeed or fail. There is only try.
Because, beyond success or failure, there’s a deeper issue. I think it’s time for another story.
Four years before I was born, my oldest sister died of leukaemia. She was eight.
I was born into a family with history. And a very different perspective than probably most of yours. Adding to that history and that perspective, a year after Patty died, my sister, Eileen, was born. She had Down’s syndrome.
Now, when you ask just about any expectant parent if they want a boy or a girl, most of them will smile and say, “I don’t care, just so long as the baby’s healthy.”
Meaning not just born without a cold, but with all their fingers and toes in the right place, with the requisite number of chromosomes and not one more.
Which is as it should be. We want our children to get the best start in life. We wouldn’t wish extra challenges or disability on anyone.
And yet.
And yet I am the person I am today because I was lucky enough to have Eileen as my sister. She taught me compassion and joy and the importance of a really great pair of shoes. I learned different definitions of success and failure from her.
I learned not to hold back my joy or my affection. She had the ability to focus on the good that still takes my breath away.
Life was not easy for Eileen. People aren’t always kind. But she scolded the people who needed scolding, ignored those who weren’t worth her time and loved the rest of us fiercely and well.
She lived a good life.
A child with a disability is not what any parent would choose. We would avoid that, as we would avoid illness and unemployment. We plan for our interpretation of the best and call it a success when we get there.
And yet.
And yet it’s the times that life sandbags us that we see what we can truly become. Or what others can truly become for us. It’s the wabi-sabi people with their wabi-sabi lives who make this a world worth living in.
I would never choose those moments of crisis and grief. No one would. You make plans for happy Christmas dinners and great vacations, not gathering the family in hospital corridors or down at the police station.
And yet. And yet without these moments we are nothing.
We are merely successes.
It’s not that I don’t make plans, that I don’t try to move my life in directions that seem like a good idea to me. There are times when I can rock a to-do list with the best of them.
Making plans and getting things done are fine, great, even. They’re what you do to fill the time between the big adventures.
But life sends you opportunities, moments that strip away your defences and your successes, that leave you wide open and heart-broken and amazed. And it seems to me that the height of arrogance is to think that my plans, my ideas of how life should be, are wiser than that — are wise enough to rely on.
Eileen died more than twenty years ago. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of her and miss her.
I’m still learning the lessons that she taught me. And she is why I cannot ever fully get behind any lifestyle design/productivity/reach-for-the-stuff-of-the-stars mentality. People say that your life is of your making and I hear Eileen’s gleeful snort of laughter.
Yes, you can build your ideal life, but no matter how big your dreams, I think it will still be a small life.
You can ask: what do I want my life to be? But what if life is wiser than you?
